Today's Great Blag Entry By Jeremy

That store makes some fairly sweeping generalizations about their customer service  

Jeremy, your Sametime Status today is a little light on details.  What the crap are you talking about?

So, I got a receipt yesterday from a fairly common retail store which, for strictly Blag purposes, we'll call, "KDNickel's."  I got a pair of shoes from them in a transaction that was entirely unremarkable.  The cashier scanned the barcode, did not check to make sure both shoes were the same size (which is a nice touch that a lot of stores use when selling shoes), asked me if I wanted to open a store credit account for a modest discount, placed my shoes and receipt in a bag and said, "Have a nice day."  Pretty standard fare, really.  It was neither a positive nor negative experience, which really is what I hope for in this type of transaction.  

I get home, and I realize that my receipt has a register-programmed bit of information at the top.  It said, and I quote, "You Were Given Great Service By ________."  A lot of places do this type of thing now, where they print the name of the cashier at the top of your receipt.  It gives you a little sense of ownership of the transaction, thinking you can trace any issues back to a single cashier quickly.  Of course, this assumes that each individual cashier is required to log into the register, which by itself is not a valid assumption, and also that each cashier provides their real name.  I was once given a restaurant receipt from my waitress, "Lady Gaga."  I have reason to suspect that Stefani Germanotta was not actually serving me a burger in a random restaurant in New Hampshire that day.  

It was somewhat new, of course, that the receipt simply categorically stated that I was given great service.  That takes our assumptions at least one step further, that not only was my service provided, but that I would categorize it as "Great."  I believe I established earlier that it was not great.  It was un-noteworthy.  Great service would involve something more along the lines of giving me a massage and a refreshing beverage while I shopped, and polishing the fingerprints off of my credit card after I swiped it.  The service I got was perfectly adequate, but certainly not Great.  

Also, I should mention that the underline thing at the end of the sentence there...that was NOT me self-censoring his name for Blag purposes.  That is entirely literally what the receipt said.  It did not include the cashier's name or any sort of identification number.  It was a blank underlined space.  

So maybe that's the point.  I wasn't given great service, so the receipt it telling me that I got Great service from nobody.  Which is fine.  But at that point, I would still kinda like to know the name of the cashier in case there are any problems.  

By the way, it's almost Thanksgiving, which means it's time to go on vacation!  Jeremy Is In The Office will be Out Of The Office starting tomorrow, returning next monday, November 30th with all new Sametime goodness.  Happy Turkey Day, everybody! 

This Makes Less Sense Than Usual

Some days, I order lunch I don’t want just to prove somebody wrong

You just can't let other people have their little victory, can you?  

I don't want to feed into people's stereotypes about me.  Also, one of these is offensive.   

So, I've been working at the same collection of buildings for several years now.  It's nice to have that level of stability, even if it might get a little boring and repetitive on occasion.  The fact that I'm never actually bored at work helps with that a little bit, I suppose, but that's beside the point.  When you work in the same place for a long time, you get to know the local lunch places...unless you're one of those types that has time to pack your own lunch in the morning and bring it with you in one of those little squishy lunch bags that you have to put your name on or else somebody's going to jack it from the fridge before you get to enjoy it because your coworkers are jerks.  I'm not one of them...anymore.  

Around here, there are fairly few places to go for lunch.  Mostly because I don't usually have an awful lot of time to find lunch and then eat it before my next meeting starts.  So, most days, I'm limited in my options.  That's the bad news, but at least the places that I'm limited to are pretty decent.  There's a deli across the street, and a Chinese restaurant next to the deli, and a totally decent barbecue place up the road...and not a whole heck of a lot else.  Oh yeah, the cafeteria sucks here, and they just raised the prices on everything so forget those people.  

Over time, the people who run the deli and the Chinese restaurant and the barbecue place have come to recognize me, since I'm a regular.  With that, they've come to also know my tendencies, and they try to use that information to predict what I'm going to have for lunch.  

I don't like this.  

In the case of the Chinese restaurant, it's a little offensive, though.  Some time ago, there was another engineer who used to work here who would often come with me to the Chinese place.  He would invariably order the exact same thing every time.  I prefer a little variety, but I certainly have my favorites.  His lone order and my favorites did not overlap.  It should also be mentioned here that the other engineer looks nothing like me.  Shortly after the other engineer moved away, the wife of the owner would assume that for my lunch, I wanted the one thing that the other guy always ordered, and would greet me into the restaurant with "General Tso Chicken?" instead of "Hello."  I don't want General Tso Chicken...I never get General Tso Chicken, yet I'm mistaken for General Tso Chicken Guy.  I seem to disappoint her every time I order something else.  

The guy who owns the deli thinks I only eat the buffalo chicken sandwich, and the cashier at the barbecue place always wants to get my macaroni salad side dish even if I didn't order it.  

Whenever these assumptions are made, I feel obligated to go against them.  Even if I wanted buffalo chicken or a side of macaroni salad (their macaroni salad is amazing, incidentally), I refuse to order it if it's presumed that I was going to order it.  I don't know why I do this. 

Just Can't Let It Go

Yes, I’m still annoyed with that trivia question we got right.  Yes, I have a problem


This is merely scratching the coat of wax on the surface of your problems, Jeremy.  


So, not long ago was Trivia Night.  It's a thing that happens all over the place in all manner of forms.  In this particular instance, there was actually a buzzer that you had to press, and a guy who had to run around the bar getting people's answers after they buzzed in.  It was a unique change of pace and offered some significant advantages over other pub trivia methods once they replaced the battery in our buzzer and allowed it to actually work halfway through the first round.   

Needless to say, our team was composed of geniuses like myself and we won.  That's tangential to the story.  

One of the reasons that we won was our brutal domination of a category in the second round that involved weaponry used in Science Fiction.  Questions ranged all the way from Tron to the Death Star.  One of the questions dealt with Star Trek.  Surprise surprise.  Pretty much as soon as the host mentions anything out of the Star Trek universe, you're pretty much certain that the answer is going to be "phasers," and you'd be correct.  That was, in fact, the answer, and we totally did get it right.  However, there was a quirk in the question itself that irritated me.  The question said something about a thing you can set to stun, and then went on to talk about how it's a thing that Kirk and Spock would fire at the Borg.  

Star Trek fans are cringing right now.  

Yes, setting the phasers to "stun" is classic Star Trek.  Kirk, Spock, and the Borg are key fixtures in Star Trek.  But, kids...the timeline here is just all wrong.  See, Kirk and Spock were part of The Original Series, which deals with the Enterprise's "Five Year Mission" which takes place between the years 2245 and 2250.  Humans weren't introduced to the Borg until well into "The Next Generation,"in the year 2365.  While it's entirely true that the crews of The Original Series and Next Gen had some minor overlaps (McCoy had an abnormally long life and was a guest on Next Gen's Enterprise once, Scotty was trapped in suspended animation and made a single appearance, Spock was a Vulcan, so he lived long enough to see the Next Gen Crew, and there was an entire movie devoted to time travel between the two crews), none of these overlaps dealt with the Borg.  

It's quite safe to say that the trivia question was Bunk, as Kirk and Spock never canonically fired their phasers on the Borg...set to stun or otherwise.